


And it seems to me that when I close my eyes all the lights in the world go out

by tiger_moran



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Alternate Ending, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 07:34:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/537050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiger_moran/pseuds/tiger_moran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the events after the incident at the Reichenbach Falls from Moran's POV. (Implied Moriarty/Moran and past Moran/Watson)</p>
            </blockquote>





	And it seems to me that when I close my eyes all the lights in the world go out

   Even though he’s sodden and freezing from searching, he closes his eyes and there’s nothing. No water. No cold.

   No light.

   No Professor James Moriarty.

   He remembers standing on the edge of the desert and watching the sun set. He remembers a warm body behind his; warm lips on the back of his neck; kissing down his spine. Blue eyes meeting his when he turned around and laughter and curses and ecstatic groans pulled from that fine throat as he took him. A doctor.  _The_ doctor, who was here before, searching, with men and lights, trying to find bloody Sherlock Holmes, until they finally managed to pull him away. Moran watched them; didn’t help; searched himself, after, but it wasn’t Holmes he was looking for. Moran was looking for the best and wisest man he’d ever known, not that rangy (and possibly drug-addled) little shit.

    The doctor is perhaps the one man now who might even remotely understand Moran at this moment, but Moran doesn’t want to be understood. That was a lifetime ago, what they did, and the colonel isn’t that man any more. He’s not anything any more.

   He opens his eyes again, but nothing has really changed.

   “Professor?” he says, but he can’t hear his own voice any more, over the roar of the water.

   His grip tightens on the rifle a fraction of a second before he realises why, his instincts running ahead of his conscious mind, and when he takes the shot he’s as cold and as merciless as the water. Colder. Maybe all of life has lost its warmth now, for him.

   He misses. Not surprising, in this terrain. The figure who should be dead and broken anyway  _goddamnit_  scurries away, into the night.

   “Bastard,” he says, but that’s lost to the water too. To the dark. Empty curses to a man whose body should be lost forever alongside Professor Moriarty’s, except that’s not  _his_  place. It should be  _Moran_  by Moriarty’s side, in life, and beyond, not a bloody amateur detective who  _dared_  to think himself fit to even look Moriarty in the eyes.

    He laughs, realising that the sainted Dr. Watson doesn’t know that Holmes lives and the detective likely has no intention of letting this on to him yet either. Good. Let Watson suffer more. Let them both suffer, before Moran finds them and kills them both, and that pretty wife of Watson’s as well (and he’ll kill her quick; he won’t hurt  _her_ ; he’s never cared for hurting women, but she simply has to go now).

    Moran’s laughter is the near-hysterical laughter of a lunatic, and it breaks off abruptly.

   He wonders what this development means, and he sits; rolls a cigarette; smokes it, leaning on his rifle. Eyes closed again. Waits. Waits. Waits some more. Does not notice when the cigarette burns down so far it scorches his fingers; only lets the stub fall from them numbly, into the chilled, wet dirt. He resolutely does not snatch up the rifle in a tight grip or take the shot a heartbeat later; doesn’t even turn when he feels more than hears the footfalls behind him. Just smiles, crookedly, when the man behind him says, fainter than usual, perhaps a little pained, but in that oh-so-familiar voice:

   “My dear Moran.”

   “Sir,” he says, opening his eyes, and his voice cracks now and he still doesn’t turn around even at the man’s approach and he doesn’t yet ask how. Moran is clever, but he’s not like Moriarty. Moran’s equations and sums and formulae are all about death; calculating wind-speed and trajectory and distance to take the perfect shot - ending life. Saving his own has always been something that seemed more down to luck than rational thought. Really though, he doesn’t yet ask how because he doesn’t give a shit  _how_.

   He only cares that the breath on the back of his neck now is warm.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title and some of the imagery taken from the Coil song 'Slur'


End file.
